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Wednesday, 29 August 2012

We
can start discussion of this topic with a little survey: what does it
mean, to you, to speak “good X”,
or “standard X”,
where X
stands for the name of a language that you speak? And what does it
mean, to you, to be a competent,
or proficient,
or good
user of a language? You can also ask your friends to answer these
questions, and have some fun collating the results.

You
will
have fun, I promise you. Attempting to describe qualifiers like
“good” and “competent” in connection with uses and users of
language is extremely entertaining, in that you can spend your whole
life trying to find “the” answer to these questions. It’s not
just that these labels have all come to mean the same: I can safely
guess that your survey will show, for example, that good
X means standard
X and that both mean correct
X, or that competent
users of X are proper
and/or native-like
or even accentless
users of it, or vice versa. It’s mostly that these labels are
judgemental – just think of what their opposites mean, on which you
can also conduct a revealing survey. To a linguist like me, judgement
values about language are interesting as expressions of personal
opinions, not as expressions of linguistic facts, which is what
linguists busy themselves with.

In
this spirit, I once suggested a project topic to my class of beginner
linguistics students in Singapore, where they were to survey what
Singaporeans understood by labels like good
English and good
Singlish. The former
label was readily accepted as a viable survey question, but the
latter drew baffled silence. Singlish is a native Singaporean language
which, according to official Singaporean takes on the matter, is
neither native nor a language: it’s just ‘bad English’, a
statement which is about as accurate as stating that Principense, say, is ‘bad
Portuguese’. The students were reacting to my apparent ignorance in
attempting to collocate an adjective like “good” with something
that is as inherently “bad” as Singlish. So I decided to speak
some Singlish, and the students again stared blankly at me –
those who did not burst out laughing, that is. “That is not
Singlish!”, some of them finally giggled. “It is”, I insisted,
“it’s bad
Singlish.” I think I was able to drive my point home, because the
discussion of their survey results on both questions turned out
to be extremely interesting.

The
thing is that some uses of language have become associated with
prestige, another judgemental label which has nothing to do with
linguistic facts, and thereby assumed as the only “proper” uses
of language. This is why standardised varietiesof different
languages also became synonymous with the labels identifying those languages by name,
sometimes in ways that users
of those languages find it hard to recognise,
let alone implement in their everyday life.

What
users of X
do use, that fails to meet “the” standard X,
is thus dubbed bad
X, or improper
X, or accented
X.
Multilingual mixes, that I’ve addressed several times before,
are a favoured target of language guardians. But monolingual uses are
fair game too, whether in grammar, prosody or vocabulary. So-called
“contracted” forms (another intriguing label to which I’ll come
back soon),
for example, like aren’t
and they’re,
are also bad language, and so is what many of us call “slang”, a
word which we often use even without knowing exactly what it means
(yet again), but to which we nevertheless attribute overall negative
connotations. You can do another survey, to
check out what it means to say “That’s slang”. But if you do, don’t
tell your informants about this newly published book, titled
precisely Slang.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but its subtitle, The
people’s poetry, and
a look inside seemed to me to
show that Michael Adams agrees with my definition of what lingualism
is all about: it’s about what people
do with their languages.

Persuasions and practices based on ill-defined judgemental labels don’t help us understand
what’s going on and what’s required in language learning, for
children
and adults alike. They merely create the illusion that the labellers
know what they’re talking about, which is probably the reason why
they go on impacting language education policies. The articles
collected in Multilingual, Globalizing Asia. Implications for Policy and Education give an appreciation of current language policies, in multilingual
Asia. And
Rosina Lippi-Green’s book, English with an Accent. Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, explains
the role played by policy makers, schooling and even Disney cartoons
in perpetuating myths about language uses as tenets of what she calls
“standard language ideology”.

In particular, such persuasions and
practices have little to do with fostering linguistic intelligibility
which, to me, is the end purpose of learning to socialise through
learning languages. I’ll come back to this matter next time.

Saturday, 11 August 2012

Language courses are routinely
identified by the name of the languages that they claim to teach you.
Things like Advanced Course in Turkish or Learn Swahili in
Three Weeks are common sights on textbook covers and
internet sites.

We learners might then be excused for
thinking that we are learning a language, when what we are in fact
presented with is one particular variety of that language. What we
call “languages” are about as invariant as what we call “human
beings”, so course creators and sellers might in turn be excused
for omitting mention of which variety their creations and products
reflect. But we language learners might think it courteous, to say
the least, to be informed about what exactly is contained in what
we’re consuming, just like we also prefer to know what exactly is
contained in that appealing chocolate bar at the convenience shop.

Chocolate bar standards, however, arise
from bottom-up preferences dictated by consumer markets, whereas
language standards differ in two respects: they are dictated top-down
and they serve offer rather than demand. Language course contents do
not stem from a belief that everyone
will be equally well-served by the standard language varieties on
standard offer either: rather, it simply is unprofitable, for
writers and publishers, to provide language materials which are
tailor-made to learners’ needs or, for schools, to change textbook
adoption policies, which routinely involve the use of (read ‘being
stuck with’) the same materials for several years, precisely
because shorter-term adoption contracts are too expensive.

The
limited offer geared to user needs in language teaching matches the
limited offer in speech-language diagnostic and assessment tools,
for monolinguals and multilinguals alike. Like
speech-language therapists, language teachers may find themselves
required (read ‘forced’) to work with language varieties which
they themselves do not use outside of professional duties, and to
assess them against standards which in addition may not serve their
clients either.

I can give one example. Many
years ago, I attended a French summer course in Pau, in the French
Pyrénées-Atlantiques. There I met a few other Portuguese students,
who spoke a different Portuguese dialect from mine. In particular, we
pronounced our so-called “rolled-r” differently, as in the ‘rr’
spelling of my surname. Mine is a uvular articulation, at the back of
the soft palate, theirs was an alveolar one, at the upper gum ridge,
and we used our respective r’s in our French too, as we had done
ever since we first learned to speak French. We soon found out,
however, that by doing so I was being a good student, whereas they
weren’t “putting in the required effort”. I wondered what kind
of “effort” I was giving evidence of, since all of us were doing
exactly the same thing, speaking French as we always had. The issue
was that my French ‘r’ happened to match the standard Parisian
one which was required as proof of “good” command of the
language. The irony of it all was that their ‘r’ matched the
mainstream Béarnais French accent, which was the one we heard around
us.

Being required to learn a standard variety of a language is not an
issue in itself: whatever the
variety or varieties of our language(s) that we use outside of official circles, we all need to learn to navigate (some) standard of those
languages. But it wouldn’t hurt to
also learn that languages come in many standards, and that what
people sometimes call “the” standard
is just one of them.

I
can’t remember whether our teachers at the French course spoke in their
own accents or in the “good” one with one another and with us
students, outside of the classroom – probably because everyone
understood everyone else, when we were using the language to talk
rather than to demonstrate classroom-bound linguistic skills, an
issue I’ll come back to some other day. But I was constantly reminded of this episode in my
later language teaching career, when, as a beginner teacher, I took
it as my duty to comply with unwieldy textbooks and assessment
materials on offer, and equally unwieldy students who, because they’d
been brainwashed about “good” uses of language being “the”
language, were persuaded that, say, Standard Lisbonese (or whatever
you choose to call it) and Parisian French were in use, or should be, in
places like Luanda and Liège, respectively, to where they were
relocating after completing their language courses with me.

The issue has nothing to do with murky concepts like “nativeness”.
Béarnais accents are as native as Parisian ones, which makes one
wonder what (certain) people might have in mind when they say that
“competent” language learning means emulation of “native” proficiency.
The issue has nothing to do with linguistic competence or
intelligibility either – unless we wish to argue that native
Béarnais French speakers should also put in some “effort” in
order to sound “good”. The issue is, to me, a non-issue, because
it stems, yet again, from an ingrained confusion about what terms
like good, standard, competent, native,
intelligible, and so on, might mean. The next couple of posts
deal with these matters.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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